The B&W shot above is yours truly because our esteemed editor said he wanted to personalise these ramblings - I have to admit it was taken a few years ago, cos I don’t have anything more recent that I’d figure was worth publishing. I'm the one on the left. The young lady is - oh, never mind, I’ve never even explained her to my wife!

The Martians Have Landed

Drag racers, by their nature, especially in the early days of the sport when it was just finding its feet as an offshoot of hot rodding, were individualists, prone to doing things their own way. Let's say they were often . . . unconventional.

Add to this a youthful exuberance, in a new sport with little wisdom founded in hard experience, which added up to what today would appear to be little more than a cavalier disregard for basic safety. Hey, we were all young and - as with all youth - bulletproof. It made for some fun times.

No definite date can be given for this occurrence, except that it was about 1971 or 72. In those days the highways of Australia were certainly more, ah, agricultural, in many places. You could be bustling along a stretch of blacktop, heading to the next town, and suddenly be face to face with a right angle bend or a U-turn, or on a broken bit of old concrete surface, with poor signposting, or the possibility of cattle wandering around. It kept you awake, at least. Nothing like a shot of adrenalin every now and then to ward off slumber.

One such series of awkward deviations in the Pacific Highway - which forms part of our Highway #1, one of the major arteries running almost right around the perimeter of the continent - used to be encountered just to the north of the town of Taree, on the New South Wales (that's a state) North Coast. If you were heading north you barely had time to get up to speed before encountering them, but if you were coming south you would be humming along on what seemed a (for then) good road when suddenly you ran into these dodgy bends with an old concrete surface on the edge of what was a small valley area.

The first bend you hit was a beauty, a right angle to the right, with these cow paddocks off in front.

Towing home one night after racing at the old Surfers Paradise strip was Sydney drag racing identity Bruce Phillips, along with his business partner Bob Rayner and sundry others.

There was a bit of fog around at the time, and talk in the car got to the usual hackneyed tales of ghosts and UFOs and Martians. Remember, this was only about 10 years after the flurry of the 1950s UFO mania, and there were plenty of old black and white movies on television about the invasions of metalic spacemen and books and magazines appearing claiming we were being watched.

It wasn't that Bruce or any of the guys in the car were gullible enough to believe this stuff, but it made for interesting idle chat to keep the eyes open after the long 600-mile tow up to Surfers, an exhausting day of racing and then the long tow home.

In the last half of the trip and with the time well after midnight the group approached Taree and began to run in and out of patches of fog as they approached the little valley. Suddenly Bruce had an idea.

"Hey, how about we get out the firesuit and I can go out there in the paddock in the fog. I'd look like a spaceman. It'd scare the crap out of drivers."

Now this plainly had the makings of a great idea, and instantly there was bustle in the car as sleepy heads lifted and began looking for somewhere to get the car and trailer off the road, when suddenly they were coming over a little rise and there was this right hand bend and before them a big open paddock. This was getting better all the time.

Just down the road was an ideal spot to park the race car and tow car, and while Bruce climbed into the old shiny aluminised firesuit, pulled on the silver boots and grabbed the face mask, Rayner got a long piece of rope and tied it to the end of a torch.

Waiting in the shadows for a gap in the traffic they snuck, giggling across the road and plunged into the darkness and fog hanging in the paddock.

Several minutes later a car appeared over the little rise, the two white cones of headlight-illuminated fog fumbling into the paddock, when suddenly a sweeping light flashed through the mist, off in the distance, and there, in the foreground was a giant silver figure, with a strange silver face and large dark circular eyes, two hands hanging, clawlike above its head, shuffling toward the road.

There was a screech of brakes and a sudden weaving of the headlights and the car swung around the corner and accelerated towards the safety of nearby Taree.

Shortly after there was another car, more screeching of brakes, and then another and another. Some came to a halt, the occupants staring unbelievingly at this strange apparition in the thickening mist, before screaching off. Others almost seemed to accelerate before they got to the corner.

It was a good act, professionally carried out. The Martian invader must have covered a few miles, walking stiff legged and monster-like towards the road then scrambling to take his position back in the paddock, between the highway and his "spacecraft", designated by Rayner swinging his torch on the end of a rope.

It continued to be a good act, all the way up to the moment when the police arrived, and with torches at the ready (thankfully they didn't take the paniced reports of spacemen seriously enough to come with guns drawn) chased the Martian and his spaceship until they caught them and took them to their leader, at the police station in Taree.

Fortunately it wasn't a lengthy interview, but the constabulary took a dim view of pseudo-Martians frightening innocent travellers and they imposed a small penalty. It was the last (reported) sign of interplanetary behaviour on that part of the Pacific Highway.

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